


Firefighter

by ScurvySailor



Category: Grand Theft Auto Series (Video Games), Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Emotional Baggage, Gen, Mental Instability, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:49:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27030724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScurvySailor/pseuds/ScurvySailor
Summary: What did flames need to survive?A short study on Mr. Phillips, and really anyone else who's been hurt by those they loved.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Firefighter

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this long ago and rediscovered it while cleaning out some old folders; I figured it could have a home here with you folks.  
> Thank you for reading; please enjoy!
> 
> * * *

It was easy to assume that Trevor wore his heart on his sleeve. Spending even a few minutes with him yielded a wide gamut of violent, intense emotion. Brief flashes of glee, lust, rage, and disgust simmered close to the surface, bursting through with little warning like lava splitting through dark rock. Those surges burned like lava, too; they melted through the things he touched and the people who surrounded him. They devoured him whole in a wildfire of feeling. But even the grandest forest can only burn for so long before it runs out of trees, and anyone who gave him a good, hard look would see little left emotionally but tinder. 

There are tricks to saving forests from burning, and the tricks to saving men aren’t so different. Some could prevent the blaze before it starts; that was not an option for Trevor. Hypocrisy, mockery, and disloyalty ignited him like discarded cigarettes and lightning strikes. They conjured fury in him like nothing else, and they were ubiquitous human traits, inescapable in North Yankton and in San Andreas.

Other men could smother their ire and reduce it to embers; they could suffocate their bile with friends, drugs, movies, and delicious food, and even if the fire inside them didn’t go out, it burned low enough that they could keep going, bolstered by its warmth even as they ignored it. But Trevor’s fire required his attention. Disregarding it would mean allowing it to seethe and fume and boil deep under the surface, smoldering like a furnace until it overheated and cracked and exploded.

And Trevor had been burned _so many times._

So he could put up a fire line. Without it, he would be consumed, melted, incinerated. He would burn out, down to nothing but charred bedrock. It had happened already, before he even knew the summits of human misery. He knew the great zeniths of sanguine emotion, and the pits of inane cruelty that they dropped into. He was more familiar with that place than most people, and he nearly let it eat him alive.

But he learned, eventually. What did flames need to survive?

They needed heat, for one. But there was no removing the heat from a life like Trevor’s; he couldn’t control the duplicity of men, or their self-interested tendencies. He couldn’t even control his own inclination towards greed and vicious narcissism, and so the heat seared his entire being.

The flames couldn’t burn without air. But his air was righteous indignation, and he wouldn’t dare let anyone stifle that. In many ways, he considered honesty in all things a beacon to be reflected throughout his world. He would not choke his own fire if others were going to just keep burning; that would be ludicrous.

But flames also needed fuel, and he could control that. The fire would burn regardless, and he could control the amount of fuel it had, and how deeply it raged. He could dig a firebreak in his heart and keep the weakest parts of him shielded. He could bury his soul in dirt where heat couldn’t touch it. He could leave it locked beneath mud and muck. Safe.

But he didn’t. Not always.

Sometimes the fire burned too hot and scorched the furrow he dug around himself, crawling across and igniting whatever he kept hidden on the other side. Sometimes he let his guard down. Sometimes someone would come along with a shovel and break through frozen ground and find him, vulnerable in his foxhole of self-sabotage. These were the times Trevor feared, because they inevitably ended with him shattered and reeling, picking up the pieces once he was alone again.

And again.

And again.

Eventually, a person learns to stop picking up the pieces.


End file.
